Kalman: Complacency Defeated Desire In Bruins' Dressing Room This Season
BOSTON (CBS) -- The Bruins aren't headed to the Stanley Cup playoffs because they ranked in the bottom third of the NHL in scoring almost all season and couldn't make up for their lack of offense with the type of stifling defense that had become their trademark for several seasons.
Those are the tangible reasons the Ottawa Senators and Pittsburgh Penguins will be playing this week while the Bruins plan toward next year and fret over who will be their general manager and who will be their coach, if any changes are made at all.
Intangibles cost the Bruins as well. They never seemed to take the regular season seriously, even when their fate was hanging in the balance. Coach Claude Julien and the players can pat themselves on the back for playing hard Saturday against Tampa Bay before and after the Penguins beat Buffalo to eliminate Boston from contention. But even half of the gumption the Bruins showed in Tampa would've gone a long way toward helping them beat Florida two nights earlier, or win a few more games over the course of the first 81 games, so they could've avoided the situation they were in over the weekend.
Instead, the Bruins didn't control their own destiny after losing to the Panthers and the Washington Capitals. They entered the third period of their game against the Panthers with the score tied 1-1, and left town with a 4-2 defeat. In that third period, the Bruins looked nothing like that team that's been at or near the top of the NHL for more than half a decade.
"That's tough. The fact that we let that moment slip from us, I don't know what happened in between that period that we came out and had the period that we did," forward Brad Marchand explained Monday on the Bruins' breakup day at TD Garden. "I think it just showed how much more Florida wanted to knock us off than we wanted to beat them and get in. That's a tough one to explain. I don't think I have an answer for that one. You stumped me."
Marchand might've been stumped, but he was onto something. It wasn't just the Panthers that wanted to win more. It was pretty much every team the Bruins came up against over the course of the season. That's why the Bruins were never able to win more than five games in a row (they reached that mark four different times) and why they were able to sleepwalk through two stretches of six games without a win. It's why they wasted a 3-0 lead against the Calgary Flames, lost to Colorado on a goal with less than one second remaining and allowed a bundle of goals at the end of periods all year. It's why they couldn't put away the Buffalo Sabres and lost in a shootout and why they couldn't score one goal against the Washington Capitals in three games.
Complacency defeated desire in the Bruins' dressing room this season.
"I think because we've had so much success over the last couple of years, maybe we took things for granted too much and I guess got a little too cocky at some points in this season," said forward Milan Lucic, who was one of the biggest culprits of complacency. "And it ended up catching up to us."
Marchand on Monday recalled a couple of moments involving Mark Recchi that stuck in his memory since the 2011 run to the Stanley Cup championship. With the Bruins down 0-2 in series against Montreal and Vancouver, Recchi "stood up and talked our team through it and gave us that hope. I'll never forget that."
Maybe Marchand should've done more to emulate Recchi when this season was going off the rails. Lucic could've done that, or any member of the official leadership could've done a better job to keep the Bruins on course. Some of the blame for the Bruins' fat-and-happy attitude has to fall at the feet of captain Zdeno Chara, along with alternates Patrice Bergeron, Chris Kelly and David Krejci. However, the Bruins are adults, and a great deal of their makeup comes from having 10 guys who played in both of Boston's trips to the finals and won the Cup in 2011. There was no reason that age or a letter or anything should've prohibited one or two players from providing a "Mark Recchi moment" that might've squeezed one last burst of success out of the team.
After Recchi left, Andrew Ference, Shawn Thornton, Jarome Iginla and Johnny Boychuk soon followed. All brought different types of leadership and examples set. Along the way the Bruins sometimes had players step up to fill the leadership void, and sometimes they didn't.
"In team building, you have to pass the torch," general manager Peter Chiarelli said. "You have to do that, and then you have to do that to the younger or mid-age guys, and that's part of the process. We done that before, and you've seen some of our former younger players grow into these roles, and we will continue to do that."
Not enough of those "former younger players" asserted themselves when the Bruins needed them this season. Instead, the Bruins played as though they were entitled. This is no longer an accusation fired off from afar. The players just about confirmed their inability to exercise a killer instinct during their media sessions Monday. And now something has to change.
Chiarelli acknowledged puck transition and scoring as the two areas he wants to improve over the summer, either through personnel moves or changes to the Bruins system. That's fine, but he also has to look out for players that have better character and more hunger. While keeping most of his core together, Chiarelli is going to have to find (with Julien's help) a way to instill the underdog mentality that made the Bruins so resilient the past several years. They don't have to overhaul the whole roster. Chiarelli just has to identify the weak links or link and remove that element, even if he has to make a trade that's less than fair or if he has to release someone.
For the first time in eight years, the Bruins will have a four-month offseason to rest up and come back revitalized.
"I think you're going to see a lot of guys come in ready to play and have something to prove, and those are the kind of guys you want on your team," Marchand said.
So far, the coach and GM have been granted a reprieve. Although they think their job status is still in doubt, they were allowed to publicly address the future of the team Monday as though they're going to be a part of it. Assuming Chiarelli and Julien are the Bruins' brain trust entering next season, they're going to have to find a way to bring back that accountability. Their jobs will depend on it.
Matt Kalman covers the Bruins for CBSBoston.com and also contributes to NHL.com and several other media outlets. Follow him on Twitter @TheBruinsBlog.